The times, they are a changin’
Dear Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey, don’t expect Congress to bail out college sports and restore the industry to where an athlete gets a scholarship and then devotes his or her body to the school that has given that athlete a scholarship. The athletes are the stars of your show and deserve a piece of ticket revenue, of television and now stream revenue and a piece of the revenue that the college sports industry gets from marketing partnerships including casinos and sports gambling companies. The athlete also needs better health care, particularly the football players who do suffer head injuries although the concussion issue seems to have been buried as it is not a concern of the sports media.
Sankey is imploring Congress, a group where all 435 House seats are up for grabs and where about a third of the Senate is out campaigning and forgetting about facing issues, to do something to help the college sports industry. The college sports industry wants some sort of law regarding outside payments to athletes through marketing agreements and to make sure athletes, despite being the reason money is poured into the college industry, don’t become school employees. “I think Congress has still an opportunity to use the structure of this settlement to enact legislation to strengthen the future of college sports,” Sankey said. Sankey claimed no student has come up to him and said they “to be like a lawyer. There are those who advocate for that reality. That takes me back to a fundamental statement, which is there’s no better time to be a student-athlete than right now in the history of college sports. No better time. And again, they’re not calling me saying, ‘I want to be an employee.'” College sports is fighting to regain a time that has been lost.
Greg Sankey
Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191
Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com
